


Don't Close Your Eyes

by ivorygates



Series: Waterloo'verse [4]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Based On Somebody Else's Fic, Dark, Derivative, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-04
Updated: 2009-12-04
Packaged: 2019-10-26 15:24:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17748434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: Danielle Jackson has a midnight caller who doesn't exist.  More or less.





	Don't Close Your Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> I have found a surprisingly large amount of unposted ficbits over in my fic journal on Dreamwidth. This particular one was inspired by "Dial Tones" by Synecdochic. It's kind of "Waterloo Bridge"-adjacent.

When the cellphone rings she doesn't answer it unless Mitchell isn't here. Only one person has the number. Only one person has _her_ number: god knows Mitchell doesn't. Is that good or bad? If he knew her, he'd leave her; the cosmic irony there is that he really should.

#

_—Still alive?_

—My life is so boring these days. Did you want something? Or just to talk?

_—You didn't used to bitch about talking to me._

Only it wasn't him. And she's fairly sure _(unprovable theory)_ that it isn't her, time and Entropy _(Death and Resurrection and a little Science)_ having done their work. But she can close her eyes, and it _is_ , it is him, so _(therefore, by logical extrapolation)_ it's her as well. When love and all the world were new.

—You never call unless you want something. What is it this time?

— _See if you're alive. See how Mitchell's treating you. See what you can tell me about Sweden._

—One: yes. Two: we have intimate candlelight suppers and take long walks on the beach. Three: it's been at peace since 1814, maintaining neutrality in all conflicts of the later 19th, 20th, and 21st century — so far.

_—Ha and ha. Sweden's switching out IOC Delegates. Why?_

—I'll get back to you.

#

She never asks him questions. She doesn't want answers these days: she has far too many. She's formed an admittedly-inaccurate picture of his life from the remarks he's dropped in passing. They seem casual and accidental. She knows they aren't.

She doesn't ask Mitchell questions either. But there are times when she wants to know things _(things she would have asked Sam, once upon a time, Sam, Sam, Sammikins, two girl geniuses together out to set the world on fire and she's the only one left to watch it burn),_ and she makes an idle comment _(that isn't; her idle chatter was flensed away long ago, by fire and fire and fire and—sometimes—by ice)_ and—later—Mitchell will tell her what she wants to know.

He never asks her why she wants to know.

He should.

#

_—You ever talk to him?_

—Why should I?

_—Old friends._

—We were never friends.

No. Always more and less. She knows he knows, because of who he was, but she's developed the useful ability to think about things without thinking about them at all, because her past has become a darkling and divergent wood hedged about by signs that say: "Here Be Dragons", and Time is neither linear nor bound by causality, and that means the past is never over.

#

Her life is a different place these days. A man whose name she will no longer allow herself to remember used to joke _(once upon a twice-told tale)_ that she needed to be kept on a short leash. These days she wears a collar in truth, and another man _(Mitchell)_ has bound her passions and the desires she never wanted to have with a chain of promises given and extracted.

The SGC is a different place than any place the voice on the other end of the phone can possibly remember. Though he can't _(she tells herself)_ remember it at all. The dichotomy of truths _(what is, what can't be, the convenient lie she's chosen to hold as truth)_ , form the Hecatean crossroads at which she lives her new life. New lives for old, new lamps for old, but the genie can't be put back into this particular bottle. Ay, there's the rub.

—Lundgren wants to get into bed with Chekov.

She hears him laugh. A sharp bark of disbelief. It sounds different from the one she's banished from memory _(no reason it shouldn't; he's someone else. If he weren't, she wouldn't take his calls)_ , as if she's edited her own past in some disastrous paradoxical way. If she could, she would: bid Time return, summon the whirlwind, catch fire and draw flame...

_—I'm going to hope you don't mean that literally. Or maybe I don't._

—Chekov has always been too kissyface with us—for values of 'us' being the US, not the SGC—for some peoples' tastes. The rest of the IOC is trying to set up a coalition to swing the balance of power their way.

_—Lucky thirteen. Not too hard to get a simple majority with odd numbers._

—They need a two-thirds majority. We have Russia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Japan just because they won't vote the same side of any issue China does, thought we had Sweden. India flips back and forth. We can usually bribe Brazil. Nobody can ever figure out what Italy's going to do. We got Egypt last year because nobody wanted anybody crazier, the EU didn't want Mexico, and we didn't want Colombia. Apparently we have the Netherlands so we can bribe The Hague, but they can be counted on to vote against India and China most of the time. Except when they smell an England-Canada-US voting bloc going on.

_—You're chatty tonight._

—Don't expect me to summarize IOC voting patterns in under two hours.

#

She doesn't know what use he can make of this information. The IOC is central to her life; irrelevant to the one she imagines _(when she stoops to imagining anything at all)_ for him. She sometimes wonders if he calls her just to call. Or if the content of the calls isn't the purpose of them. He certainly has other ways of discovering the Russian Republic's position on Free Trade than by calling her.

—You should hire yourself a secretary. 

_—I had one, but I had to fire him. He spent too much time surfing the net._

She'd point out that—at a conservative estimate—twenty percent of his random queries can be answered by use of the Internet _(it's how she gets some of her answers, after all)_ , but that would allow their conversations to descend into ... something she will not permit them to descend into. (It's not a road less traveled, but rather a former superhighway now buried beneath blast debris, and she has no interest in excavating it. She will not summon spirits out of Tartarus to gain voice by sacrificial blood.)

Nor will she wonder if there are other phones, other midnight conversations, who they might be with. She will not wonder. The _rapprochement_ she has brokered with conditional sanity has as its keystone this healthful lack of curiosity. If curiosity merely killed it would be kinder; she has schooled herself not to expect kindness.

Sometimes he calls every few days for weeks at a time. Sometimes, not for weeks on end.

_—What would you say if I said I missed you?_

He never uses her name. She wonders what name he'd call her by if he did.

—I'd call you a liar. You never call unless you want something. What is it this time?

She knows Mitchell's seen the phone—knows he knows it isn't SGC-issue, that he knows that's the only one she carries—but he's never asked. Mitchell leaves her all her secrets, even the ones that are slowly killing her.

_—You know, you should really think about retiring._

—And give up our midnight chats? Who'd answer your questions then?

_—I'd find someone._

He _will_ find someone else. That's one of the truths she's built her life upon, because she's never left anyone in all the years of her life: they've always left her, and for that to change at this late date would be a fundamental derangement of reality she isn't sure she could accept. The walls between Past and Future have crumbled like wet sand when the tide rushes in: all that remains is Now, the indrawn breath of Time, the moment between arrival and departure. And so she leaves the phone on her pillow or in her nightstand as she waits for it to ring.

As she waits for Mitchell to leave.

###


End file.
